At last EMC take a decent page from IBM’s book and I would like to thank and congratulate them for this. At every Customer Council I’ve attended, IBM’s Redbooks have been held up as something to be emulated.
And at long last, they appear to have listened and acted in the form of EMC’s Techbooks becoming available to everyone without the requirement for a Powerlink login. I look forward to it becoming a valuable resource for all in the same way that the Redbook site is.
Great work guys! Perhaps the rest of you want to take note to make sure that you make as much of your stuff available to everyone as possible and not hidden behind a login of some sort.
NetApp has had the vast majority of it’s technical reports and whitepapers publicly available for years (at least since I joined), which can still be found here
http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports.html
Is there something else you think should be there ?
Dont start Martin on the quality of NetApp documentation, see the previous blog post.
Anyway how about Netapp making their VSA freely available.
Okay, this is going to sound very odd but the problems I have with many of the technical reports is that they are very NetApp specific often.
The nice thing about many of the Redbooks is that they are often a good source of reference for more than just IBM specific stuff and there is often a decent amount of breadth.
I think it’s great that you do publish them tho’…so Three Cheers to you too!!
I believe that the VSA will be made freely available and the reason that the OnTap 7 simulator never became generally available was to do with some licensing issues.
I agree that Redbooks are a nice model. However, you’ve got to look at the size and focus of IBM vs. the size and focus of NetApp.
Number of IBM global employees: 399,409
Number of NetApp global employees: 9,760
IBM sells mainframes, UNIX systems, x64 systems, storage, networking, global services, outsourcing, and god knows what else.
NetApp sells storage.
Just by our size and nature, we don’t have the people or resources to publish really broad documents. By our nature we do have to focus on things that are specific to our technology and products.
Our technical reports will focus on broader technologies and other products where we have to, specifically when we’re talking about interoperation with other products and applications. But those are again, focused on how we interoperate, and not in a more general sense.
Hey Roger,
no need to be so defensive and I thought NetApp were more about more than storage; yes, you sell storage but I get the feeling that you want to be about more than that? I would say look at some of the EMC papers as well; some of them barely mention EMC stuff for a great majority of them. It can be more than about selling stuff, it can be about informing, engaging and giving back.
And don’t people keep trying to convince us that NetApp punch above their weight…it’s not all about size!
‘Believe in Better’, that’s what I say….I’ve even got a perspex award which says that I do….do you believe?
Not being defensive, just pointing out that while aspiring to the level of IBM Redbooks is commendable, it’s really hard to do at our scale.
We really do try to provide the best level of information we can to our field and customers (I write TRs for a living – most of the “top 10” technical reports on our external document library come from my group).
We do have a couple of ex-IBM folks on our team and the Redbook production process is something that we don’t (at least right now) have the manpower to produce.
But you bet we are working on improving both our documentation (as you’ve pointed out previously) and our other technical information like TRs. Our TRs aren’t supposed to be about selling products, they’re supposed to be about providing useful information about a product or an aspect of our products. Sometimes that’s best practices, sometimes it’s a discussion of why you’d want to use a certain feature/product.
We do try really hard to make them not be marketing documents – we have scads of those that our marketing folks produce like any other tech company does.
On the topic of Redbooks, nice to see industry recognition of IBMs efforts in this area. #;-)
Not sure if this makes things better or worse, but IBM regularly accept residency nominations from non-IBMers (both from Business Partners and Clients), so in fact the Redbook Author pool is much wider than just IBMs employees.
Indeed, IBM also produces Rebooks based on partner content. Quite a number of NetApp technical reports are republished as Redbooks (mine included), since we have the OEM relationship with them for the N-Series storage.